The Trip Planner

See the USA in your Chevrolet.
America is asking you to call.

Sung by Dinah Shore in 1952 (Want to see it? Click here.)
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It's starting to get cool here, and on the days when it rains it feels quite chilly. Mind you, that is by Sydney standards. I still wear shorts and a t-shirt, but have started adding a sweatshirt on the odd occasion. (I write things like this primarily to annoy the folks living in the snow belts who actually have weather where they need to factor in things like wind chill.)

But with autumn at full throttle here, this a perfect time to start planning our next great adventure, which will be a Road Trip in the northern summer. We've talked about this adventure for quite a while, and promised ourselves that when LK retired and we both had time we would A) see parts of the US that we had never seen, B) revisit friends, many of whom we haven't seen enough of since we moved here more than 20 years ago and C) instead of just popping in for a couple of days on the back-end of a business trip, we would spend enough time with our families that they would begin to wish we'd head back home.

So, from mid-July through early September, we will be driving across America from California to the East Coast. We are going to check out cowboy country by going across the northern part with stops in Nevada, Utah, Wyoming and Iowa. We will see geysers at Yellowstone, real-life props from Spielberg movies at Devil's Tower and the Grand Tetons, mountains probably named by a Frenchman who knew our friend Shirley.

Of course, our timing is, as usual, about as bad as it can be. LK read that the hottest places for vacations this summer will be the very ones we're planning to visit. Oh well, can't let heavy traffic and long lines ruin this adventure - at least not in advance. We will just consider ourselves trendsetters.

We thought about a side trip to South Dakota to see Deadwood and Mt Rushmore, but right now, that's out. And I have been fortunate to convince LK that there's no sense in going to Minnesota because the Mall of America is closed for renovations those months.

From the northwest we will escape to the central part of the country, which is mostly known as the rather uninteresting bit between the two coasts. And then on to friends and family in New Jersey, New York, Vermont, Massachusetts and a side trip into Canada.

But the very best part will be seeing so many of our friends, starting out with our new friends Robert and Jaki in northern California, and ending with folks we've known so long that they know what I look like with hair.

Being retired, we are going to tackle this with as many freebies as we can figure out. My next challenge over the coming week is to figure out how many points I need in the various hotel programs and move my frequent flyer points into them. For a trip this long, I suspect it will be an all-day affair to get it right, but given how much it can save it is worth it.

It's three months away, but we booked our flights a couple of days ago and now I am getting stoked. As The Cars sang, "Let the good times roll."